THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Nearly five years after the greatest financial crash since
the Great Depression, triggered by rampant illegality and fraud on the part of
the major banks, not a single major institution or leading bank executive has
been indicted, let alone tried, convicted and jailed.

CRONY CAPITALISM:
OBAMA PROTECTS JP MORGAN, THE BIGGEST BANKSTER CRIMINALS IN AMERICAN HISTORY,
AND ONE OF OBAMA’S BIGGEST BANKSTER DONORS!

Nearly five years
after the greatest financial crash since the Great Depression, triggered by
rampant illegality and fraud on the part of the major banks, not a single major
institution or leading bank executive has been indicted, let alone tried,
convicted and jailed.

The criminal
charges are part of an attempt by the Obama administration to create the
appearance that it is cracking down on Wall Street criminality, while it
continues to shield top executives and allow banking fraud and criminality to
continue unabated.

“Records show that four out of Obama's top
five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs
($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup
($358,054).”

Why aren’t the Wall Street
criminals prosecuted?

By
Barry Grey
7 January 2014

In May 2012, only days after
JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon revealed that his bank had lost billions of
dollars in speculative bets, President Barack Obama publicly defended the
multi-millionaire CEO, calling him “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got.”
What Obama did not mention is that Dimon is a criminal.

The New York Times
reported Sunday that the government will shortly announce the latest in a long
list of sweetheart settlements with Wall Street banks involved in criminal
wrongdoing. Federal regulators and prosecutors will, as early as this week,
make public a “deferred prosecution” deal letting JPMorgan and its top
executives off the hook for their complicity in the $20 billion Ponzi scheme
run by disgraced financier Bernie Madoff.

In return for payment of some
$2 billion in fines, the biggest US bank and its CEO will be allowed to avoid a
criminal indictment or admission of guilt, even as they acknowledge the
government’s list of illegal actions carried out by the bank during its
twenty-year relationship with Madoff.

There is ample evidence,
including internal emails from senior executives, proving that top management
was well aware that Madoff, who kept his firm’s accounts at JPMorgan, was
running a scam. Madoff himself, in a 2011 interview from prison, said, “There
were people at the bank who knew what was going on.”

JPMorgan chose not to warn US
regulators and to continue its lucrative relationship with the Ponzi schemer.
(See: “US in sweetheart deal with JPMorgan over complicity in Madoff Ponzi
scheme”). This is a violation of federal laws, including the Bank Secrecy Act.

The settlement amounts to an
acknowledgment that Dimon was a criminal co-conspirator with Madoff. Yet Madoff
has been sentenced to 150 years in prison, while Dimon is going scot-free.

Dimon and his bank were
complicit in a fraud that cost thousands of retirees their life savings and
bankrupted a number of charities. But this is only a small part of the human
tragedy and social carnage from multiple swindles and frauds carried out by
JPMorgan.

Over the past two years,
Dimon’s bank has settled charges that it palmed off toxic mortgage securities
on false pretenses, filed false reports to conceal over $6 billion in losses
from soured derivatives bets, manipulated energy prices, forged foreclosure
documents to force families out of their homes, charged credit card holders for
services it did not provide, and defrauded pension funds and other
institutional investors.

It is currently being
investigated for its role in rigging Libor, the global benchmark interest rate,
and bribing Chinese officials.

JPMorgan is not the exception; it is the rule. Virtually every
major bank that operates on Wall Street has settled charges of fraud and
criminality on a staggering scale. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee
on Investigations released a 630-page report on the financial crash of 2008
documenting what the committee chairman called “a financial snake pit rife with
greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

These multiple crimes by
serial lawbreakers have had very real and very destructive consequences. The
entire world has been plunged into an economic slump that has already lasted more
than five years and shows no signs of abating. Tens of millions of families
have lost their homes as a result of predatory mortgages pushed by JPMorgan and
other Wall Street banks.

The collapse of the housing
and credit markets in 2007-2008 as a result of rampant speculation and fraud
has bankrupted entire countries—Greece, Ireland, Iceland and Spain, to name a
few. Detroit and other cities have been thrown into bankruptcy as a result of
bankers’ machinations.

Governments all over the
world have used the economic crisis as an opportunity to carry out a relentless
assault on the working class, ripping up the social gains achieved in the
course of a century of struggle. Millions of lives have been destroyed by
homelessness, hunger and disease as a result of the practices of the Jamie
Dimons of the world.

And while
billions of people have grown poorer, Dimon and his fellow plutocrats have
grown richer than ever. Their banks, shielded by bribed politicians, regulators
and governments, have raked in record profits, subsidized by trillions in
taxpayer bailouts and virtually free cash provided by the Federal Reserve.

OBAMA CRONY DIMON

Dimon was paid $23.1 million in 2011 and $11.5
million in 2012, adding to a personal fortune that is in the hundreds of
millions.

With the $2 billion in fines to be levied in the
Madoff settlement, JPMorgan will have paid out $20 billion in legal costs just
over the past year. The scale of the fines is an indication of the colossal
dimensions of the crimes committed by the bank, but they represent only a small
fraction of the immense wealth it controls. The fines have been calibrated by
the Obama administration, in negotiations with Dimon, to avoid threatening the
bank’s viability.

JPMorgan, which has reported
more than $20 billion in annual profits over the past several years, boasts
that it has set aside $28 billion to cover fines and legal costs. As of July
2011, it had $244 billion cash on hand.

All of the criminal
activities of the bankers, and the resulting social devastation, have been
motivated by personal greed. These are parasites whose behavior can be
described only as sociopathic. Dimon and his like do not even remotely
contribute to the betterment of society.

Corruption is nothing new to
American capitalism. But unlike the robber barons of past eras, today’s
plutocrats are not associated with the development of the productive forces,
such as steel and auto. People like Dimon make their fortunes from the
manipulation of money—chiefly other people’s money. The criminality that
pervades capitalism today is bound up with activities that are entirely
parasitic and destructive of the productive forces.

More is involved here than
subjective personality traits. Dimon and his counterparts on Wall Street are
personifications of a system characterized by staggering levels of social
inequality. The criminality they exhibit is the inevitable manifestation of a
society where the richest 0.1 percent control 10.3 percent of income, and the
wealthiest 1 percent control 35 percent of the wealth. Such levels of
inequality shape the legal and political structures and are ultimately
incompatible with democracy.

Not a single Wall Street bank
or leading banker has been criminally indicted and prosecuted, let alone
jailed, for his or her crimes. That this is the result of a deliberate policy
on the part of the Obama administration was spelled out last March by Attorney
General Eric Holder. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder
explained that the federal government chooses not to prosecute top bankers
because “if we do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on
the national economy, perhaps the world economy.”

This is an admission that the
Wall Street parasites are above the law. What prevails in America is not
democracy, but a revival of what in former epochs was called aristocratic
privilege. Under feudalism, the aristocracy enjoyed immunity from the laws that
applied to ordinary people. Today’s financial aristocracy is, in practice,
similarly immunized.

This is a country where 2
million people are behind bars. Every day people are hauled into court and
thrown into jail for committing crimes whose principal cause is economic
destitution. American society is remorseless in its treatment of the poor, but
infinitely forgiving when it comes to the atrocities of the rich.

It is this reactionary social
layer that controls the levers of political power, from the White House to
Congress and the courts. It dominates the major political parties and bribes
its representatives. It owns the mass media.

The bankers cannot be called
to account for their crimes because they control the political system and
because criminality has become an essential feature of the US and global
financial system. To attack any part of it threatens to unravel the entire
rotten edifice.

It is the task of the working
class to break the stranglehold of the financial plutocracy. This is a
revolutionary task. Financial fraud and criminality are embedded in the very
structure of the capitalist system.

The working class must
organize itself independently in a struggle against the financial elite and all
of its parties and institutions. It must expropriate the vast wealth obtained
by the bankers through illegal and antisocial means and use it to provide jobs
and social services to the masses of people. This is the only basis for
bringing criminals like Jamie Dimon to justice.

This is just the starting
point for a fundamental restructuring of society. The subordination of the
financial system to the personal accumulation of wealth must be ended. The
banks and major corporations must be taken out of private hands and placed
under public ownership and democratic control, so that they can be used as
instruments of international economic planning, as part of a socialist economy
geared to human need, not private profit.

latimes.com

The Madoff settlement is an enormous win for a guilty JPMorgan

Let's get a few points straight regarding the federal government's "big" $2-billion-plus settlement with JPMorgan
Chase over the bank's complicity in the Madoff case.

-- First, JPMorgan, where Madoff kept his major
bank accounts and which profited handsomely off its relationship in numerous
ways, knew Madoff was crooked. Bank executives had him figured out as early as
1998 -- possibly earlier -- or 10 years before his arrest and public exposure
as the mastermind of a record-breaking Ponzi scheme.

The U.S. banking system relies on banks themselves
as the first line of defense against fraud -- that's why they're required to
file "suspicious activity reports," or SARs, with financial
regulators. No institution had a clearer view of Madoff's fraud than JPMorgan,
which had "plenty of reasons to be uniquely suspicious," as U.S.
Atty. Preet Bhahara said at a news conference announcing the settlement. But
JPMorgan never filed a SAR with the U.S. As a result, Madoff continued working
his black magic for years after he could have been stopped.

-- Second, it's a scandal and an affront to the
principle of equal and fair justice that the federal prosecutors handling this
case named no individuals as bearing criminal responsibility, and even deferred
criminal prosecution of the bank itself for two years, contingent on its
keeping its nose clean.

-- Third, regarding JPMorgan's public statement
about the outcome of this investigation: How shall we put this politely? It
resembles hay after it's been passed through the digestive system of a horse.

For example, the bank says, "We recognize we
could have done a better job pulling together various pieces of information and
concerns about Madoff from different parts of the bank." Better job?
JPMorgan made no effort whatsoever at "pulling together" the
information its various units had. Every time some executive there had a
reasonably complete picture of Madoff's scam in his or her hands, someone
vetoed making a disclosure to the public or the U.S. government.

Who issued those vetoes? We don't know. The
prosecutors don't say. More appallingly, they may not have asked.

The bank states: "Madoff’s scheme was an
unprecedented and widespread fraud that deceived thousands, including us."
Based on the statement of facts issued today by the prosecutors, to which the
bank assents, this is an out-and-out lie. JPMorgan reduced its investments in
Madoff's funds by 80% -- $288 million -- from October 2008 to Dec. 11 that
year, when Madoff was arrested. They would have sold off more, if they could.

Earlier, a top bank executive vetoed a $1-billion
investment, placing a cap of $250 million on Morgan's exposure, because he
smelled a rat. Madoff, it seems, had refused to let Morgan's experts look at
his books. After expressing "We don't do $1-billion trust me deals,"
the executive decreed. Speculation that Madoff's business was a Ponzi scheme
was rife at JPMorgan headquarters.

After Madoff's arrest, JPMorgan executives
congratulated themselves on their foresight. "We got this one right at
least," one executive emailed another. The bank's chief risk officer, who
had vetoed the $1-billion investment, emailed his senior colleagues to report
that draining the funds out of the Madoff accounts means "we actually look
like we have some clue of what we're doing."

Other evidence of JPMorgan's guilty knowledge
abounds in the government documents. The most striking was an Oct. 29, 2008,
report that the bank's London office filed with British regulators listing
their concerns about Madoff. Among the concerns was his consistently sterling
reported investment returns in good markets and bad. This performance appears
"too good to be true -- meaning that it probably is," the report
said.

U.S. law required the bank to file the same sort of
report of suspicious activity with U.S. regulators. JPMorgan did not do so,
apparently because Morgan's lawyers blocked it. And why? One clue lies buried
in the government statement of facts: because Madoff was such a big
broker-dealer that he might represent "significant business" in the
U.S. for JPMorgan.

That underscores the folly of the government's
wrist-slap approach to financial fraud. Even with the penalties and restitution
of more than $2 billion, JPMorgan can reasonably view the outcome as the cost
of doing business. It almost got away with letting Madoff skate.

It's hard to imagine a better illustration than
this case of governmental dereliction identified by U.S. Judge Jed Rakoff in
his recent essay about the lack of prosecutions resulting from the 2008
financial crisis. As we reported a week ago, Rakoff took special aim at the policy of
prosecuting companies rather than individuals for white-collar
wrongdoing.

"Companies do not commit crimes," he
observed; "only their agents do ... So why not prosecute the agent who
actually committed the crime?" He complained that prosecutions of
corporations usually yield only fines and an agreement that the company set up
an internal "compliance" department. "The future deterrent value
of successfully prosecuting individuals far outweighs the prophylactic benefits
of imposing internal compliance measures that are often little more than
window-dressing."

Sure enough, the JPMorgan settlement requires just
such window-dressing. It's mandated to "continue ... to implement and
maintain an effective ... compliance program" with the requirements of the
Bank Secrecy Act. You mean it wasn't in compliance already, as required by law?
If JPMorgan meets this requirement, then the government will drop its threat of
an indictment against the bank in two years.

The
deterrent effect of this requirement is zero. If the government were really
determined to root out white-collar crime and prevent outfits like JPMorgan
from condoning law breaking that unfolds in front of its own eyes, it had the
tools to do so: Indict the bank executives and officials who knew Madoff was
crooked and did nothing, and threaten to revoke the bank's charter. Would that
be a great loss to the financial system? JPMorgan has been racking up
multibillion-dollar settlements over white-collar misdeeds on an almost monthly
basis lately. It hasn't been operating like a bank, but like a criminal
enterprise. And as this case now shows, it has been aiding and abetting its
fellow criminals along the way.

WELFARE – THE
STAGGERING COST OF MEXICO’S LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA. THESE ARE!ONLY! WELFARE COST AND DO NOT INCLUDE THE
COST OF THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE, OR THE ULTIMATE COST OF MEXICO’S ASSAULT
ON OUR BORDERS, LAWS AND CULTURE… Push 2 for English!

According to the
Centers for Immigration Studies, April '11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal
alien families receive some type of welfare in the US!!! cis.org

“Since
President Obama came into office, SNAP participation has increased at 10 times
the rate of job creation, the annual spending on SNAP has doubled, and one in
seven Americans now participates in SNAP,”

Wilkes noted that “Hispanics will account for 52 percent of
our nation’s total population growth” throughout the coming four decades and
will “make up 74 percent of the growth in the nation’s labor force from now
until 2020.” The 11.3 percent unemployment rate among Latinos suggests that
“having a wireless phone can make the difference between someone receiving the
call for a job interview or missing that opportunity altogether.